I've search everywhere for this, but have yet to find the answer.
I have a VS2012 project with thousands of files and folders I wish to exclude from the project as I don't need them to build any longer. Clicking on the folder and choosing Exclude From Project works, but takes literally forever - at times it appears Visual Studio has stopped running and I have to kill the process.
Question: What is Visual Studio actually doing to exclude a file from a project? Is there a way to simply go into the project file and exclude the files by folder? My project file does not appear to store this information. Where are excluded files defined for the project?
You can open the project file (in s text editor, i.e. Notepad) and remove the lines with the files that you want to exclude.
You can also do that in visual studio but you first need to unload the project (right-click on the project, unload)
Delete the folder in VS which has project to unload then restore it from recycle bin.
It works for me.
Related
My Visual Studio (VS) project/solution works as intended, but VS has somehow organized the directory structure (source files) of my project in a non-logical way.
The current directory structure
Solution Folder
Project 1 folder
Project 1 source files
Sub folder
Project 2 source files
.sln Solution file
Project 3 folder
Project 3 source files
I guess I have made a mistake at some point when adding the projects to the solution in VS, since it is organized like this now.
What I would ideally like is this more clean structure:
Solution Folder
Project 1 folder
Project 1 source files
Project 2 folder
Project 2 source files
Project 3 folder
Project 3 sources files
.sln Solution file
When I tried this - or whenver I move/try to reorganize the files/folders outside of VS according to the above by simply moving them around, and then try to build the solution in VS afterwards, I get the following error for (pretty much) all items:
The item (name) does not exist in the project directory.
It may have been moved, renamed or deleted.
So my question is:
How do I reorganize my folders/files for my solution outside of VS, without breaking my solution?
For people who might be having similar obstacle, I found the answer to it from this thread:
Visual Studio move project to a different folder
As described in there, you have to delete the project you wish to move from inside your Solution Explorer in Visual Studio (VS). Afterwards, you move the project folder (outside VS) to where-ever you want it. Finally, in VS Solution Explorer, you right click on your Solution --> Add --> Existing project.
Make sure you dont separate any folders or files, that belong together (be very careful/aware of this).
If you were referencing the different projects e.g. through namespaces, you have to add this again simply by right clicking the project (in Solution Explorer) that you want to reference another project --> Add --> Reference.
EDIT: Visual Studio might, for whatever reason, change which project is initializing first when building/debugging etc. If you look in VS Solution Explorer, the project which is initialized first is bold. If you need to change this, right-click on your desired start-up project --> Set as StartUp Project.
All of the above is for Visual Studio 2017
I'd like to share a common .targets file between different folders within the same project (using Visual Studio 2015):
MyProject
MyNupkgContent1
build
MyNupkgContent1.props
Common.targets
MyNupkgContent2
build
MyNupkgContent2.props
Common.targets <-- should be added as link
When I try to "add as linked" Common.targets to MyNupkgContent2/build, the dialog closes but does not actually add the link. Adding files as links from a different project works fine. Is it possible to link files between folders in the same project?
I'm not certain as to how you should go about linking it but depending on contents and size of application, your best bet may be simply going into your packages and manually copying + pasting them into MyNupkgContent2
Why visual studio shows folders this way ?
The first app_data shows nothing...it is totally useless but i'm afraid to delete it....
Any idea ?
You activated an option for a project to show files and folders which are within your project folder but not included in the project yet. If you activate this option you can manually add existing files/folders to the project by right clicking said files.
The project I'm working on normally runs on an embedded Linux system, but we have a rehosted version for debugging in Windows. Naturally the Visual Studio project isn't always kept up-to-date with the files in our "real" project.
Sometimes a file is moved from one directory to another. This leaves Visual Studio unable to locate the file.
I know I can close Visual Studio, open the project file in a text editor, and manually change the file location. But this is annoying. How can I point Visual Studio to the new file location without manually editing the project file in a text editor?
First off, you don't need to close Visual Studio. You can unload a project (Solution Explorer > right click on project > Unload project), then right-click again and choose "Edit", this opens the project file in VS's text editor. After you save the file you can tell VS to reload the project by right-clicking the project node again.
However in your case, a better solution might be to use wildcard expressions in your project file, as documented here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms171454.aspx and http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms171453.aspx
i.e. Use a double-asterisk to tell VS to recursively search a directory to include files matching another wildcard pattern.
e.g.
<ItemsGroup>
<Compile Include="**/*.cpp" Exclude="SomeSpecificFileToExclude.cpp" />
</ItemsGroup>
Does anyone have a way to add multiple folders and (existing) files within those folders to a Visual Studio project in a single step (or via macro)? Let's assume all of the folders and files were copied/pasted into the project folder where they need to reside relative to the project folder, but are not actually stored in the .csproj or .vbproj file, which I believe is a requirement to compile those files into the solution/project.
This works great if you have a web application project in your solution, but not so well if you have a .csproj or .vbproj. In that case, you must manually add folders (and nested folders), and add existing files and browse to each one individually, which can take a long time.
In the solution explorer, select the project, click the "Show All Files" button - .
This will show all the files, even those not part of the project. You can now select all of these in the solution explorer (using Ctrl + Click) then right click and go to "Include In Project".
In Visual Studio 2013 (and possibly earlier) you drag the folder from windows explorer and drop it on the project in the solution explorer.
Other answer given in this thread wouldn't work for me as the files I want to add (DTSX files) are in a different folder, and copying/moving them causes other problems. Here is what worked for me:
Using Visual Studio 2015, use Windows Explorer to locate the files you want to add to your project. Copy those files to the clipboard. If DTSX files are what you are dealing with, in the Solution Explorer right-click on SSIS Packages, and then click on Paste.